


Sepsis

by glasscamellias



Category: MOTHER: Cognitive Dissonance
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Gen, Illnesses, Injury, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 02:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15547554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscamellias/pseuds/glasscamellias
Summary: As Giygas's influence reveals the evil hidden inside people and animals, Cerue struggles to continue on in the face of growing hopelessness.





	Sepsis

Animal bites and scratches carried a strong risk for infection, her mind told her on autopilot. Secure the subject if necessary, clean the wound, use Healing, beta level or stronger. Bandage to avoid further contamination. Pus, inflammation, and fever were common warning signs....

She couldn’t move. And she should have moved, instead of freezing there, staring at the underbrush where a black and white cat had disappeared, hand clamped over a still-bleeding wrist.

It was easy, forgetting about the world outside. Her visitors had come and gone, and she had put it out of mind. Those four would save the universe, and soon things would return to normal, and soon it would be safe to venture out for new test subjects. Cerue focused her mind inward and let months and years pass in a haze.

She sometimes heard sounds of screaming from the surface of the planet, which couldn’t be explained away as wind. More and more of her plants were dying, and no amount of soil analysis and careful pruning and adjustment of the sprinkler cycles was enough. The cats were becoming like strangers to her.

Once, they had learned how to open the doors, crawling in at night to nestle against her in her opened hyberpod, unable to sleep properly if she couldn’t hear the water sloshing in the tanks. Once, they would follow her around, vocalizing hunger despite their scheduled mealtimes. Once, they would sit on her tablet whenever she tried to jot down extra notes, delicately batting at her face.

For a while now, they had refused to be touched, scattering when she tried to get close, but this bite was something new and worrying. It wouldn’t be safe to sleep with them becoming this aggressive, not while they still had free rein of the lab. She didn’t rest much these days, but if she collapsed unexpectedly, she didn’t want to do so with potential hazards around her. Sealing them back in the tanks that they were supposed to live in this whole time was proving...difficult. She still had the crates she had used to initially collect them for study, but how was she supposed to catch them?

It upset her, to mix sedatives into their food, crates ready to be used. They refused to approach her even if it meant missing their meals, and she had seen the marks of cat teeth in various plants and leaves, grasses that had been gnawed on. They must have been hungry, and she was sure it would lure them in, just as it had when she first caught them as strays. The deception felt cruel, but she was too mentally foggy to come up with another plan. Her arm throbbed with each movement.

As she set out platters of drugged food out at strategic locations, she could hear some of the other subjects, each impacted in their own way. The spirit was screaming, as usual, but it had gone from begging to be set free to threatening her. Only one of the mooks had been affected so far, and luckily she had thought to put down a partition between the two of them before either had come to harm. The lucid one still wailed for her to let them out, insisting that their former friend would break through the glass to reach them.

That was ridiculous. The divider was made of the same glass as the rest of the tanks, and no amount of PSI or physical attack had broken them yet. It might be distressing, but they were still safe.

(There was always the possibility that they had been hiding it to lure her into complacency, or that violent delirium would set in after she set them free. It wasn’t worth the risk. And no matter how much they wailed about wanting to go home, she doubted the trip from Mercury to Saturn was a safe passage anymore. It was nominally safer to keep them here, surrounded by known dangers.)

Something about the new state of her cats made them less susceptible to sedatives, it turned out. She had reached for a cat that seemed unconscious, only for it to launch into a flurry of claws and fangs as she wrestled it into its containment. She waited longer for the second, but it still managed to rouse itself enough to give her a deep bite on the forearm.

It occurred to her that she could have conducted the whole thing with telekinesis, but it had been too long since she had touched either of them in a way that had not been painful. Sentimentality was making her foolish.

Secure the subject, clean the wound, Healing, another bandage.

-

She came to on the balcony suspended over the planet’s core, laying face down on the metal floor. It had become routine to sleep there, the door locked behind her. How long had she been asleep? The bandages on her arm had grown stiff and crusted over, but that wasn’t a reliable indication of how much time had passed.

It was irresponsible of her. The subjects still deserved to be fed, regardless of how malicious they had become, and the sprinkler system could be adjusted again, even if it was futile. The dead fish needed to be skimmed out of the tanks.

Trying to push herself up took more effort than she had in her trembling arms, and she could feel the bite marks begin to ooze. Cerue settled for rolling over instead, closer to the gaps in the railing. That small effort nearly made her tip back into unconsciousness, black flickering at the edges of her vision. Was she ill in some way? Maybe the floor felt so blessedly cold because she had developed a fever.

Trying to gather her strength, she laid there, staring down through the rails. Mercury’s heart had never looked so dim, too faint to give her afterimages from staring into it. Once, it had been bright enough to leave starbursts and smears of color across her vision, a near-blindness that she doubted was healthy. But at the time, she could only wonder if that was what religious ecstasy felt like, being so engrossed in watching it that she might have wasted away there, if the planet itself hadn’t eventually nudged her back into reality.

“You gave him a gift,” Cerue said down to the planet below her, her voice cracked and faint. When was the last time she had spoken? To her subjects, to an audio recorder, or even to herself? “And he was a complete stranger to Mercury. I’m no hero, but don’t I deserve anything for being this planet’s caretaker? Give me Lifeup Omega too, or Gamma, or anything. Something I can use to heal everyone and everything here. It’s... it’s all dying, please...”

Despite herself, she began to sob, though it seemed like she was too dehydrated to properly cry. When was the last time she had stopped for anything to eat or drink? As she watched the core, it began to grow brighter, and her spirits lifted with it. Could she bring it back with psychic intent and hope alone?

It was the final breaths of a dying planet, she soon realized, as she sent her mind down to it and heard nothing in return. Perhaps it was ridiculous to anthropomorphize the planet this much, but it truly had seemed like a creature of its own, something that loved and cared for her in return, all those years. “You can’t leave me, you can’t just die, planets can’t die like this...” She sounded like a child, but she couldn’t help it, hands curling around the railing, to brace her against the urge to pull herself up and over them. To fall into the core and hope that, in destroying her, it could be restored.

That single bright pulse seemed to be all it had left in it, and its flickers became dimmer and dimmer, until she couldn’t see them anymore, too far down into the center of the planet. But she had lived there too long to not to sense it, something that had always been at the edge of her consciousness. To not feel it now was like having a limb torn off, or a sense removed.

The lights flickered overhead, the backup generators kicking in once the planet was no longer powering the various systems of her lab. It should have filled her with urgency. Had any of her subjects realized that the tanks had been unlocked for a few vital seconds? They could be freed and searching for her right now, ready to bring her harm. In the maze of her lab, it would be difficult for them to locate her, but they could do plenty of damage in the interim.

Did it matter? Mercury was dead. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the rest of them didn’t follow suit. What had happened to the supposed heroes that had walked through her world, with all their promises?

Her subjects called out, for her death, for freedom, for help, for food. The least she could do, or maybe the only thing she could do, was to provide the latter.

It wasn’t like the lab would last for much longer anyway.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick, sad thing I've been thinking about for a while.


End file.
